There are an estimated 220 million fake people on Facebook. So how can you tell who’s who? Fake identities are the third most common complaint, according to the Federal Trade Commission, so we tried a free app, “Legitifi” that tries to find out if the person you’re about to hire or date is who they say they are. It’s touted for checking out babysitters, dates, handymen, caregivers, and could be used even for ride services and airline passengers. Legitifi’s identity-checking algorithm does some obvious things, like checking whether the same person posts under more than one name on Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites. The only dating site they check is Tinder.com. If a social media profile is too new, that […]

We love our cell phone service from Google’s new “Project Fi.” It only works with Google Nexus phones, but if you get one, your bill might be as low as $25 a month with tax. Now they’re expanding it. Google Fi currently works with three phone carriers. If the signal is strongest from T-Mobile, for example, that’s who they’ll connect to. If Sprint is better, you’ll be using Sprint. They’ve recently added U.S. Cellular. A Google Fi account gives you unlimited text and phone calls for $20 a month. Each gigabyte of data (which is what you use up when you’re on the Web and all those words and pictures come in), is $10. But you get money back if […]

“Yahoo LiveText” is for those situations where you want to see the other person you’re texting and you can’t talk. Maybe you’re at the library. You know how they are about people like you. With this app, you can text each other while also looking and batting your eyes.

If you’re deep in the Amazon jungle, in a hurricane, or traveling too far from a cell phone tower, your text message won’t go through. (Good luck dealing with the giant Anaconda.) A new device called “goTenna” fixes that by using radio signals.

Recent market research from IBM found that 90 percent of email marketing goes unread. The solution, says tech strategist Daniel Burrus, is to use text messaging. It’s just the reverse. People read and act on a text message 90 percent of the time. The trick is you have get potential clients or customers to request a text message. On all of Burrus’ print and marketing materials, he puts the message “Text Burrus to 99000 for a special handout on this subject.” For more on this topic, go to goo.gl/5B26A.

“Future Text” is a free app for your phone that lets you write text messages now and send them any time up to 30 days later. They have a $2 version that lets you write text messages now and have them sent up to a year later. (We could see this as a plot device in some mystery show.)